Sarah Eustis-Guthrie: Why Malaria Giving Makes Sense #22

Absolutely.

So malaria is one of the biggest killers of kids globally every year.

So over 500,000 people die every year from malaria, most of them kids under five.

But the thing about malaria is that we know how to stop kids from dying from malaria.

We know how to diagnose malaria.

We know how to prevent malaria.

And we know how to treat malaria.

It's not a mystery.

The reason why all these kids are dying of malaria is because the global community has decided not to invest the resources in saving those lives.

And so we live in a world right now where fewer kids are dying of malaria today than they were 20 years ago.

And that is entirely due to the fact that more folks have started investing money, investing resources in things like bed net campaigns and things like rapid diagnostic tests for malaria.

But there's still so much room to go.

And the reason we're not getting there is because this money isn't being invested.

And so we live in this crazy moment where you can stop a kid from dying of malaria for about $5,000.

That's crazy.

That's the best deal you could get.

But there's still a lot of impact left on the table because not enough folks are working in the space and not enough folks are giving money to that space.

So I'm sure a lot of listeners will have heard about this thought experiment, right? You're walking by a shallow pond and there's nobody around and you look over in the pond, you see some splashing and you look and you notice it's a kid.

There's a kid drowning in the pond and you're wearing a nice suit.

You're

coming back from a business trip.

Your suit might cost one or $2,000 and you know, you have no time.

You have to jump in and save the kid, but you'll ruin your suit.

And yeah, And the moral of this story is, wouldn't you jump in and save the child? And of course you would, right? Right.

But every day we have children dying of things like malaria, and it costs about a couple thousand dollars to save them.